Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of earthquakes. A massive earthquake in 1755 devastated Lisbon, and this disaster helped inspire a new science of seismology which intensified after San Francisco in 1906 and advanced even further with the need to monitor nuclear tests around the world from 1945 onwards. While we now know so much more about what lies beneath the surface of the Earth, and how rocks move and crack, it remains impossible to predict when earthquakes will happen. Thanks to seismology, though, we have a clearer idea of where earthquakes will happen and how to make some of them less hazardous to lives and homes.

With

Rebecca Bell Senior lecturer in Geology and Geophysics at Imperial College London

Zoe Mildon Lecturer in Earth Sciences and Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Plymouth

And

James Hammond Reader in Geophysics at Birkbeck, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson